Mini Bio

Jennifer Shrader Lawrence was born on August 15, 1990 in Louisville, Kentucky, to Karen (Koch), who manages a children’s camp, and Gary Lawrence, who works in construction. She has two older brothers, Ben and Blaine, and has English, as well as some German, Irish, and Scottish, ancestry.

Her career began when she traveled to Manhattan at the age of 14. After conducting her first cold read, agents told her mother that “it was the best cold read by a 14- year-old they had ever heard”, and tried to convince her stage mother that she needed to spend the summer in Manhattan. After leaving the agency, Jen was spotted by an agent in the midst of shooting an H&M ad and asked to take her picture. The next day, that agent followed up with her and invited her to the studio for a cold read audition. Again, the agents were highly impressed and strongly urged her mother to allow her to spend the summer in New York City. As fate would have it, she did, and subsequently appeared in commercials such as MTV’s “My Super Sweet 16” and played a role in the movie, The Devil You Know (2013).

Shortly thereafter, her career forced her and her family to move to Los Angeles, where she was cast in the TBS sitcom The Bill Engvall Show (2007), and in smaller movies like The Poker House (2008) and The Burning Plain (2008).

Her big break came when she played Ree in Winter’s Bone (2010), which landed her Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations. Shortly thereafter, she secured the role of Mystique in franchise reboot X-Men: First Class (2011), which went on to be a hit in Summer 2011. Around this time, Lawrence scored the role of a lifetime when she was cast as Katniss Everdeen in the big-screen adaptation of literary sensation The Hunger Games (2012). That went on to become one of the highest-grossing movies ever with over $407 million at the domestic box office, and instantly propelled Lawrence to the A-list among young actors/actresses. Three Hunger Games sequels are scheduled for release in November 2013, 2014, and 2015, with Lawrence reprising her role at least for the first one (The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013)). In 2012 the romantic comedy Silver Linings Playbook earned her the Academy Award, Golden Globe Award, Screen Actors Guild Award, Satellite Award and the Independent Spirit Award for Best Actress, among other accolades, making her the youngest person ever to be nominated for two Academy Awards for Best Actress and the second-youngest Best Actress winner.